This poetic ordering tells us that we are not reading a scientific account of creation. Our author is not interested in telling us how or when the universe came into being. Rather, both by the literary form and the orderly content of the prose-poem, the author is making the claim that the universe is orderly. Some things are ordered toward and by o

“The Catholic may not, as others do, merge his religious and his patriotic faith, or submerge one in the other.”30

it. Rather, we know it because it is true. And it is true only because it is part of the very intelligence that is the mind of God. We might assert that we are the sources of mathematical truth, and we hereby declare that twice two equals five. But, of course, every time we take two marbles and add them to two other marbles, we will have four marbl

Adam and Eve put themselves in the place of God by asserting that they do not participate in God’s moral knowledge, but are instead the source of that knowledge.

civic friends.

Catholics find it difficult to speak to one another because we have allowed ourselves to be informed by one of the two dominant variations of American liberalism, as found in the two dominant political parties in the United States.

Hobbes called this condition the “state of nature.” For him and his intellectual heirs, radical individualism is the natural state of humankind. Community does not exist in the state of nature, and thus there are no external moral constraints against any person to do as he pleases.

This communicative aspect of the image of God is reflected by the community of humans in the Garden of Eden. Prior to the fall, the man and woman exist in harmonious union with one another, and ordered toward God as both their origin and end. They come from God and are ordered toward God, and thus necessarily properly ordered toward one another in

This is the case for at least two reasons: First, we have forgotten the language of the Catholic moral life. Second, we have reduced moral commitments to political identity, and political identity to party loyalty. Thus our moral and political lives are more likely formed by partisan identification than Catholic discipleship. We have reduced our mo